Bloy's smear of Dix was deliberate

The Daily Twigg  Vol. 1  No. 39   April 17, 2012 (updated Apr 18)

Bloy's blunder was a deliberate start
of a long-running campaign of smears

By John Twigg

I'm still officially on hiatus pending a restructuring of my newsletters, blogs and website, but I'd feel remiss for not putting out there my two-bits worth on the Harry Bloy story, because it is even worse than the mainstream media have implied.

Though the mainstream media portrayed Liberal MLA Harry Bloy's shocking smears of NDP leader Adrian Dix in the Legislature Monday as merely a personal blunder, there is lots of evidence to suggest it was the opening salvo in what will become an incessant bombardment of character assassinations against Dix in particular and possibly others too as the passing months approach next year's provincial election (on May 14, 2013).

Nonetheless Dix announced in the Legislature Tuesday (April 17) that he had received a personal apology from Bloy in a phone call and that he (Dix) had accepted it as genuine, apparently as part of his desire to raise the level of politics in the province and to stay away from personal attacks, which drew a fair amount of quick praise for Dix plus a few suggestions his real hope is to avoid future questions about his own past personal problems.

That's probably a naive hope on Dix's part because the systematic use of attack ads is now de rigeur in North American politics and his backdated-memo incident is still common fodder for pundits and bloggers, but it also was a lost opportunity for Dix and/or his NDP colleagues to expose some of the shenanigans behind such attacks because Bloy's outburst would have been an easy target for questions. 

In fact the unusual timing of Bloy's remarks - in the midst of a debate on smart meters early Monday morning - suggests it was deliberately chosen as a test for opinion pollsters prior to the intensely-watched byelections Thursday in Port Moody - Coquitlam and Chilliwack - Hope.

Who scripted Bloy's smear?

So the question is, who put Harry Bloy, the hapless MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed, up to such a drive-by smear?

We know pollsters for all three competing parties already have a very good idea of what voting intentions are now in both ridings, where the high interest is reflected in the record turnouts for advance polls, but now after Bloy's outburst the Liberal strategists will be able to see and hear and even quantify what effects Bloy's outburst had on voting behaviour, if any (e.g. causing some people to simply stay home, which may be one of the goals).

That means the lessons learned by Liberal strategists from the by-election campaigns in general and Bloy's impact in particular can and will be applied in the run-up to the provincial election, and judging from the federal Conservative Party's successful rebranding and smearing of successive leaders of the opposing federal Liberal Party we can expect similar things here in B.C. too.

That's especially so since we've seen in the two byelections how the B.C. Liberal Party has become merely a puppet of the Harper Conservatives, especially with former Conservative MP Chuck Strahl serving as campaign chair for Liberal candidate Laurie Throness in Chilliwack; that's partly because Throness was Strahl's ministerial aide for many years but also because the Harper Cons are openly supporting a strategic alliance with the B.C. Liberals in order to try to stop the godless and dangerous socialists from gaining power even though the rising B.C. Conservative Party is ideologically closer to them.

Such political cynicism is odious to a lot of people, including some few ethical liberals, but the people behind it don't care because for them it's only about preserving their own power and money interests, and keeping their spots at the head of the trough.

What evidence is there, you ask? Well if you watched the Hansard video of Bloy's shocking remarks you might notice him glancing down from time to time, which led me and at least one other journalist to wonder on Twitter whether he was reading from notes.

Video shows Bloy using notes

And when I reviewed the video it was evident that Bloy was reading from the left-hand page on his lectern when he was talking about smart meters and from the right-hand page when he was slagging Dix - which clearly suggests he had notes and thus was not merely going too far in the heat of debate.

You can watch and read a transcript of the incident on B.C. Legislature Hansard or for a video click here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/04/16/bc-harry-bloy-apology.html


Though NDP House Leader John Horgan on Bill Good's show Tuesday morning said it seemed as if the MLAs sitting around Bloy were shocked by his performance he (Horgan) still insisted it was a deliberate and with-intent smear, noting that Bloy knows parliamentary procedure better than most members because he was for many years a chair of committees.

"The only reason that Mr. Bloy stood in the legislature today was to smear Adrian Dix," Horgan told reporters, without having to remind them that statements made in the legislature are exempt from libel laws, and that news media enjoy a "qualified privilege" in being able to repeat them.

The scripting of Bloy seemed to continue in the hallway when he told reporters he had spoken in heated debate and withdrawn the remarks and that's all he was going to say, which was nonsense except that it was enough for him to avoid a lawsuit for libel.

“In the heat of debate, many things are said,” Bloy told reporters. “I stood up in the House and withdrew the remarks.” - which also sounded like a memorized line.

It should be noted too that Bloy is a long-serving MLA who was the only caucus member to support Christy Clark for Premier and once he did make it into her cabinet he soon proved so incompetent that he had to be removed from a senior ministry (Children and Families) to a junior one (Multiculturalism) and then from that one too, after which she announced that he would not be seeking re-election.

So Bloy was an ideal sort of sacrifice: his pensions are secure, he's not running again and his reputation for being dumb is so entrenched that most mainstream media could report his remarks without worrying whether they were deliberate and scripted by others.

Horgan deplores attacks on personalities

Horgan of course deplored the attack on personality instead of debating policy that the Liberals and some key supports do, notably Philip Hochstein and his Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, but Horgan predicted it will continue and soon could be extended to B.C. Conservative Party leader John Cummins too, especially if his party was to win one of the byelections.

Other evidence of some kind of pre-planned and ongoing strategy include some tweets posted by the B.C. Liberal caucus research, notably one that quoted a 1999 opinion piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail that was critical of the then-NDP government's finances, which I tweeted was rather old and out of context - until I saw the Bloy flameout!

And I'm not the only one who sees a conspiracy here because Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith just opined much the same thing too, especially regarding how the federal Conservatives had successfully "framed" their opponents federally in the last two elections, and that Clark as Premier recently hired former aides to Prime Minister Stephen Harper "who has turned gutter politics and character assassination into a political art form."

Note too that while Bloy soon withdrew his remarks and later apologized for them too, that only gave the mainstream media new excuses to repeat the libels, the worst of which insinuated that Dix may have stolen the engagement ring he gave to his wife much like former NDP MP Svend Robinson had done for his gay partner  - as well as accusations that Dix had lied and stolen public money.

Though Clark as Premier said she did not agree with Bloy's comments, she also did not (so far) suggest he be further disciplined, such as by evicting him from the Liberal caucus as Horgan suggested would be appropriate.

“It’s a pattern of behaviour that the Premier is leading. As disappointing and tepid as Mr. Bloy’s apology was, I would hope the Premier would have something to say about this when she returns to the capital,” said Horgan.

That was probably a reference to Clark's behaviour when Bloy resigned from cabinet in March after leaking a document to a constituent, in which she said Bloy did the right thing but it was not as bad as what Dix had done when he was an aide in an NDP government: "He did not forge a memo in an effort to try and derail an RCMP criminal investigation,” said Clark.

More recently the B.C. Liberals have been using Dix's problem with a missing transit ticket in their by-election campaign leaflets: “NDP leader Adrian Dix tried to hide his fare evasion but the police caught him red-handed. If he can’t be trusted to pay for transit, how can you trust him with your vote?”
That also echoes the tenor of Clark's campaign in the Vancouver–Point Grey by-election last year, which was extremely negative against her NDP opponent, David Eby, and against the NDP in general, probably reflecting the influence of her senior campaign adviser Patrick Kinsella, who has been a fixture behind anti-NDP campaigns in B.C. all the way back to 1975.

It also may be related to the unusually extensive damage to campaign signs in Chilliwack, in which mainly Conservative signs were destroyed, reflecting Liberal anger at the Conservatives for daring to split the free-enterprise vote.

Anyway, you can now safely bet that a lot more negative attack adds will be running in B.C. in the lead-up to the provincial election.

A key point to watch for is whether the B.C. Liberals also will get access to the federal Conservatives' vaunted database on voters, which appears to have been used in the voter-suppression or robo-calling scandal that has emerged from the last federal election. That is a very powerful too which has proven to be vulnerable to abuses.

It's now common knowledge that Harper, Strahl, Throness and Preston Manning are all members of the Alliance church (see Andrew Nikiforuk on the Tyee website for details), and Christy Clark also has flaunted her High Anglican religiosity from time to time, so that raises this question: why are such pious-sounding politicians so prone to using political dirty tricks?

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New warnings re smart meters

While I'm here I want to draw readers' attention to what some of the above fuss was about, namely the growing list of problems associated with the B.C. Liberal government's $1-billion program in which B.C. Hydro is forcing virtually all of its customers to accept so-called smart meters.

It's bad enough that that was done without prior approval of the B.C. Utilities Commission, and it's worse that various problems have emerged with such meters, including emissions, invasion of privacy and some inaccuracies, but now worst of all is emerging concerns that smart meters can be hacked and that raises the prospect of the entire electricity grid being sabotaged.

That may seem far-fetched to people quick to ridicule the tin-helmet crowd, but if you note that even the U.S. FBI is concerned about it perhaps you will realize it is a real threat here and now too. Here's a link:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/fbi-finds-smart-meter-hacking-surprisingly-easy/